Records of a dowry investment fund (the Monte delle doti) operated by the city of Florence, Italy, form 1425-1545, contain information on vital events of about 32,000 girls. The records are longitudinal, and include date of birth, date and amount of investment, and date of dowry payment or death. In a preliminary analysis, we demonstrated the releability of these records and used thefirst of the 19 volumes to compute death rates and to analyze these rates according to age and time. The objectives for the present application are: 1. to transcribe into machine-readible form the entire both of Monte records; 2. to prepare a detailed analysis of the Monte records, with particular emphasis on trends in death rate according to age, time, and social class; 3. to interpret the trends in death rate with respect to the epidemiology of plague and other important epidemic diseases, and 4. to report our findings in a monograph which will include a detailed presentation of the basic data in a readily usable form.